Sunday, November 25, 2012

I had been prevaricating over just what to bake up for the November We Should Cocoa challenge and as this weekend is the last before the deadline it was time to knuckle down. The host for this month's challenge is Nazima of Franglais Kitchen and the guest ingredient for this month is bread; so a bit of a workout was in order and perhaps that is why I had been putting it off.

I love the flavour combination of milk chocolate and hazelnut but have never quite fallen for the allure of Nutella. I had been thinking along the lines of making a loaf with chunks of chocolate and chopped hazelnuts when I came across this wonderful 250g Ritter bar of Hazelnut Milk Chocolate.

Well it fair jumped into my basket. I felt instant relief at knowing there would be no tricky roasting of hazelnuts which sneakily turn much darker brown on the inside before they are nicely brown on the outside, and no messy rubbing outer skins into a tea towel that never seems to get more than half the husks off anyway.

I chose to make a quite plain bread dough and as I am trying to learn how to work with much wetter doughs than are common in domestic baking books I went for 350g of strong white flour, 150g rye flour and 300g water, 1 egg, 50g butter, 50g sugar and a small tsp. of salt. Sadly it did not quite work and there was a hint of gumminess to the finished crumb even though it had kneaded up quite well and had risen without collapsing.

I made a sort of tear apart round based on 75g balls of dough, each rolled out flat and filled with 15g of chopped chocolate and hazelnut bar and then formed back into a dough ball and placed in a round deep tray.

The buns were left to prove and then washed with egg glaze. I baked the bun rounds at 180c and pulled the trays out to re-glaze after about 15 minutes. After another 5 minutes @ 180c the

base of the bun rounds had still not fully baked so I had to tip the rounds out and bake them without the tins for a further 5 minutes before taking out to cool on a rack.

Finally; here is a bun cut in half to reveal the chocolate hazelnut centre. The crust is nice and thin and the filling plentiful, I just need to work on the crumb texture a bit more.

If you want to make your own and you have a favourite sweet dough recipe then I would just follow that but scale back a bit if it uses much more than 500g of flour. Or of course buy more chocolate so you can still put in a good proportion of filling per bun.

These make a really good weekend breakfast bread or mid morning snack and you could almost convince yourself you were eating a very healthy pain chocolat.